Dini Mehta, former CRO of Lattice, reveals how she and her team built a winning enterprise sales motion in a fiercely competitive market.
Dini Mehta never wanted to be a CRO. She was perfectly happy being an AE.
And yet, somehow, she became one of the world’s most successful revenue leaders. Her story is one of constant growth. At Quantcast, she went from Account Executive to Sales Manager. At Drawbridge, she went from the first sales hire to the VP of Sales. Then at Lattice, she went from VP of Sales to CRO — and helped take the company from an early-stage scale-up to a $100M market leader.
So we sat down with her and asked her exactly how she did it.
:::box [Growth Bytes], [Top takeaways:
- Moving upmarket is a company-wide effort. Enterprise sales success comes from close collaboration between Sales, Marketing, and Product.
- Smaller scale-ups can compete most effectively in a crowded enterprise market by being more agile in product development. You can also stand out by caring more about your customers than anyone else.
- When building an enterprise sales team, prioritize curiosity, integrity, grit, and a good personality fit with your buyers over experience in your vertical.
- Building a great sales culture comes down to trust, accountability, and embracing abundance (not competition.)
- To level up to CRO, start thinking at the organizational level, not the Sales level—and begin looking two years ahead.]
:::
Welcome to the chaos of hypergrowth
Founded in 2015, Lattice today is one of those runaway B2B SaaS success stories — valued at $3 billion, with over 5000 enterprise customers and roughly $300 million+ in funding.
But when Dini joined, back in 2018, things looked a little different. There were seven people on the sales team, and maybe 20 across the whole GTM org.
“It was definitely the smallest company I’ve joined,” says Dini. “Coming in, I was like, ‘Ooh, this is early.’”
Lattice was in what Dini calls “the chaos of hypergrowth” — “just so many leads,” a tiny team with no segmentation, and an average selling price of $3000.
Oh, and one bathroom.
Dini’s goal was to “stay in the chaos:”
“We earned the right to get there once. But the harder part is, ‘How do we put bets in place so we can stay there year after year?’”
She started by getting clear on her top three priorities:
- How do we increase capacity?
- Is there an opportunity for us to crawl upmarket?
- Is there an opportunity for us to build the outbound muscle?
And, importantly, how could she do all that, while preserving the unique culture and set-up she found already in place:
“Obviously, goal number 1, 2, 3 as a revenue leader is to grow revenue[…] But I wanted to make sure that I did it in the Lattice way.”
How to crawl upmarket (the Lattice way)
Lattice was getting some upmarket pull — they closed a major deal with Slack, among others — so Dini felt confident that an enterprise motion was within reach. But she reminded everyone that it would still be slow going:
“I remember constantly correcting people, ‘We're not moving upmarket. We are crawling upmarket…In startups, everything moves fast. You want the results next month or the next quarter. Unfortunately, these moves, especially if you're not going to abandon your existing base, take so much longer.”
Here are Dini’s top tips for steering a scale-up into a highly competitive enterprise space:
Build the revenue engine for the business you want, not the one you have
You don’t want to get stuck as a player-coach, cautions Dini. You need to keep your focus on where you’re trying to get to, “building this revenue engine for a $100 million business, not a $10 million business."
At Lattice, that looked like:
- Segmenting the sales team so they could start targeting bigger deals while still looking after the customer base.
- Starting with a single, highly experienced enterprise AE, whose role was initially just to talk to their handful of existing large clients and understand what had gone well and where they still needed to work.
- Involving the product team in the sales process, to get their buy-in for adding enterprise-friendly features into the development roadmap
- Building an enterprise-ready tech stack even before they needed one.
Partner with Marketing
Instead of fighting with Marketing over lead attribution, Dini’s attitude was that an enterprise motion has to be a full-company initiative. “One team, one dream.” In practical terms, that looked like:
- Recognizing that Sales is the last piece of the puzzle. Enterprise results are built on a solid foundation of marketing and sales enablement: “We knew that we couldn't get to outbound unless Marketing were out there marketing to these folks quarters ahead or even years ahead, to create that air cover.”
- Not squabbling over attribution: “Traditionally, everybody's like, "Oh, focus on your attribution and really get it right." We were like, ‘We're just going to grow the business.’ We didn't even talk about attribution for the first few years.”
- Sharing accountability for revenue with Marketing: “When revenue was down, I knew [the Head of Marketing was] as stressed as I was…I think that really helped because we had each other's backs.”
Compete by out-caring the competition
When you’re a new market entrant in a crowded enterprise space, “there's always going to be a competitor with a better brand, or with more money, or a better feature set,” says Dini.
There can be a temptation to badmouth the competition to get ahead. “Early on, I was shocked at the dirty games that some of the competitors would play. We were able to rise above that.”
Instead, Lattice decided to simply prove that they cared more about their customers than anyone else.
“I'm a big believer in not giving competitors airtime in our show. If a prospect asks about a competitor, we don't get down and say, ‘They suck at this. They suck at that. Here's the five things you're never going to get from them.’“
Instead, we just focused on the things we did well. We sold with integrity. Ultimately, my core driving principle as a revenue leader is: The number one thing we sell is the fact that we care.”
Use your size to your advantage
As a smaller and more agile business, Lattice was also able to move more quickly in product development. Lattice moved to a multi-product model very early in its lifecycle, a decision which felt extremely risky at the time:
“We had a great business selling performance management. It's like, ‘Do we really want to move into [employee engagement]?’
In hindsight, says Dini, “It was a really smart strategic move.” The multiproduct model became a core part of the Lattice strategy, leaving the competition scrambling to keep up.
“I remember as soon as we launched a new product, we'd see an increase in our win rates for nine months.”
The key, Dini explains, was to capitalize on the tailwind by prioritizing the upskilling of their reps with the new product messaging:
“I remember our CEO, Jack, and I sat in a conference room and played trainer. Everybody had to come in and do a mock pitch and get certified. We just sat there for two days, hour after hour. And we would fail people. We'd be like, ‘No, you got to go back and study because this wasn't good enough.’”
Create a sales culture with a foundation of trust and accountability
Dini says that the question she gets asked the most is, “How do you build a great sales culture?”
Her response? “Great teams are built on the foundation of trust and accountability.”
She remembers being on a sales team in the early days of her career, and watching her teammates cheerfully lie to their manager's face. “I knew that when I became a manager, I really wanted a culture where people would feel comfortable enough to voice opposing opinions and push back and give feedback.”
Note: It’s not a free-for-all, says Dini. “You get a voice, but you don’t get a vote.” But it’s a culture where people feel safe to be themselves, voice concerns, and know they’ll be heard.
“Most sales teams, unfortunately, are built on fear and scarcity. ‘Let's pit one person against another, one team against another, one region against another.’” Instead, Dini believes in “embracing a culture of abundance…The goal is to grow the pie and not just re-divide the pie amongst ourselves.”
Her advice is to bake your values into every aspect of team management, “from who you hire to who you promote, your sales strategy, your performance management practices, your career tracks… If somebody was stealing someone's lead, even when we were a 100-person team, it would go up to me. I'd be like, ‘Why is this happening? We're all on the same team.’”
Base hiring decisions on attitude over experience
By this point in her career, Dini has hired hundreds of salespeople. She isn’t particularly interested in whether or not someone has specific market experience. In fact, the first 15 reps she hired for Lattice had no HR tech experience, and she said their lack of preconceived ideas about the market actually turned out to be an advantage: “ It helped us be creative and innovate.”
Instead of experience in a particular industry, she looks for:
- Buyer-persona fit: “The HR persona is very different to the marketing persona or the sales persona. I think there's nuance as to who would be the best sales rep for this specific persona.”
- Curiosity, integrity, and grit: “Those are the three qualities that uniformly matter a lot more than some of the other things that people get fixated on, like pattern-matching resumes.”
How to become a great CRO
For Dini, the jump from AE to Sales Manager is a major transition — so much so that she’s always insisted on having a non-managerial career track for her sales reps. From her point of view, the biggest challenge of moving up the ladder — from Sales Manager to VP to CRO — is that “your level of control continues to reduce, but your level of accountability continues to increase. It's a really weird thing to manage your own psyche against.”
For those looking to make the leap to CRO, here’s her advice:
Think about the company as a whole, not just the revenue function
Even though you grew up in Sales, becoming a CRO means thinking from an organizational perspective, to “understand all the different pieces that have to go right for sales to do well.”
The goal is to develop your strategic thinking to the point where you could “theoretically go run any department because you understand the different mechanics of how departments work.”
You need to learn to stop thinking about the Sales team as your team, she says: “As the team grew, I spent less and less time with sales as a CRO and more and more time with other departments.
My first team was the Exec team. As a revenue leader of the company, you're the single point of accountability for all things growth and revenue. Regardless of your purview, regardless of what you formally own, ultimately, you're accountable.”
Look two years ahead
As well as taking a more global view of revenue, you need to think longer term, says Dini:
“As a VP of sales, you're responsible for your team's number, your region's number, and making sure that that is executed well. But as a revenue operator, you're saying, ‘How do I make sure that we're setting ourselves up to continue growing?’ As a VP of sales, I'm probably thinking one or two quarters ahead. As a CRO, you have to think one or two years ahead.”
Be the Chief Inspiration Officer
It’s been a tough year for a lot of companies, and Dini says that CROs have a responsibility to help their teams keep the faith:
“Sometimes the best thing you can do for your team is be patient, be confident, and just reiterate why they've joined this company, why this company is great, why they're a great salesperson. I think we need more sales leaders to be Chief Inspiration Officers versus just focusing on the business and the metrics.”
Know your why
For Dini, the biggest driver to move up the career ladder was less personal ambition than a desire to see more women in top spots. “The higher you go, 90% of the time, you're the only woman on every call.”
Dini loved being an AE, and she thrived as a Sales Manager. But eventually, she realized, “If I really want to change how sales orgs are built from the ground up, I've got to have a bigger seat at the table. And so that became my why.”
We asked Dini how she handled it all. Lattice was a success story — but the pressure of sitting at the helm of a revenue organization during such massive growth must be overwhelming.
“How do I cope?” she said. “Mostly wine.”
Watch the full episode
Watch Dini’s full conversation with Alex Kracov, CEO of Dock, on Grow & Tell—Dock's podcast for revenue leaders.
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